Day 5 - 7 June 2009

After a chilly night with rain and a meager breakfast of Cheerios, tea, and coffee we departed for the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center on the banks of the Missouri River.

I had read the chronicle of the Lewis and Clark expedition and was looking forward to seeing their journey documented. I was not disappointed. The exhibit is exhaustive and reinforced everything I had read about the expedition. I was put into the right frame of mind as soon as we entered the facility. My senior citizen pass acquired at Glacier National Park got us into the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center for free. There, a nice elderly man helped us plan our trip after leaving Great Falls by giving us explicit information about how to get to Yellowstone Park and what to see there.

After a small lunch in the camper and a short hike along the Missouri River to Big Spring, a place where lots of clear water comes out of the ground and flows into the Missouri via a short river, we headed for the Charles M. Russell Museum. The museum is located in a residential area and at first glance doesn’t reveal all that it presents. The museum consists of the Russell homestead, a log cabin studio where the master worked, and a modern building which doesn’t show it from the outside, but contains an extensive collection of paintings and other works by Russell and other artists, a fabulous gem collection, Western and Indian artifacts, a Bison exhibit, and gift shop. The building could not be better designed architecturally and is suited well for this museum.

The collection and exhibits were so extensive that we cried “uncle” after about three hours and just skimmed over the last few rooms of the museum. After all, we had already done the Lewis and Clark Center and two museums in one day usually exceeds my limit. This one I left reluctantly but our feet were saying - enough!

We managed to make it back to our camper and after a quick trip to the Malmstrom AFB commissary to lay in some supplies we were back in the Malmstrom campground. My friend made a good dinner despite the strenuous “museum day,” she also did some laundry and wrote some post cards. It is a nice sunset, the sky is clearing after being very changeable all day. Let’s end day number five here.